Staten Island Trivia

The Verrazano Bridge has seasonal contractions and expansions of the steel cables causing the double-decked roadway to be 12 feet lower in the summer than in the winter.

Mandolin Brothers on Forest Avenue has served two of four Beatles in their amazing music sales and repairs business.

Donald Trump did his own apprenticeship here in the borough, shadowing his dad, Fred Trump, around the Grymes Hill and New Dorp properties they once owned.

Famous bank robber Willie Sutton settled on Staten Island after escaping from a Philadelphia prison in 1947. He hid out on Staten Island for months while the cops hunted him down ( from a story in The Saturday Evening Post – June 9th 1951 )

Bobby Darin spent some summers in South Beach.

In 1905, Charles, Paul and Walter Witteman opened the first airplane manufacturing plantin the United States on their family estate in Island. After experimenting with gliders, they designed and built their first airplane in 1906 and continued to manufacture a number of experimental planes and models until their ever increasing production forced their move to a more spacious building on the north edge of the Newark meadows.

In the 1950’s there were eight hospitals on Staten Island – S.I. Hospital (Originally Smiths Infirmary), St. Vincent’s Hospital, Richmond Memorial Hospital, Sunnyside Hospital (was on 32 Little Clove Road near Oneida , it was opened as a private hospital in 1940, it had 43 beds and was in the path of the new highway so it was demolished in 1962 ) , Richmond Borough Hospital ( Was on the Seaview Hospital Grounds ), Seaview Hospital, U.S. Public Health Services Hospital and Willowbrook State School Hospital

Staten Island was sold by the Indians to the Dutch in 1657, for ten shirts, thirty pairs of stockings, ten guns, thirty bars of lead for balls, thirty pounds of powder, twelve coats, two pieces of duffil, thirty kettles, thirty hatchets, twenty hoes, and a case of knives and awls.

There are two artificial islands off the shore from South Beach. Hoffman Island and Swinburne Island.

Both ladies of etiquette Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt lived on the Island

The Outerbridge Crossing and the Goethals Bridge connecting to New Jersey, opens on the same day (June 20, 1928).

Queen Elizabeth II in her motorcade drives along Bay Street from Stapleton to St. George. She was aboard an Army ferryboat, the Lt. Samuel S. Coursen, on Oct. 21 1957. She departed from the slip 6 at the St. George ferry terminal with her husband, prince Phillip, after a motorcade along Bay Street. which was lined with 23,000 Islanders pressing against police barricades to catch sight of the queen on her initial visit to the United States